


A Lamp Filled With Water Gives No Light

by NothingEnough



Series: like a bird gone to roost (twin peaks) [2]
Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Amputation, First Time, Language, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Physical Disability, Post-Series, Series Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-10
Updated: 2014-07-10
Packaged: 2018-02-08 07:31:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1932114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NothingEnough/pseuds/NothingEnough
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The death of fear, the end of loss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Lamp Filled With Water Gives No Light

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know when, or if, I will get around to writing the bridge between this story and "Buddhapada". I will try. I wrote this a year or two ago and hoped to post it after I wrote the bridge-tale; that has yet to happen, and this little fragment is getting lonely on my hard drive.

If Harry were a different person--maybe even just a little younger--he'd mutter several demeaning slurs aimed at Audrey Horne right about now. He shrugged his shoulders, rolling the anger off his back.

Truman possessed only a dim clue as to the nature of Audrey's work. He figured it was dangerous, and given her ambition, brilliance, and considerable wealth, she could've had any job in the world. He knew it involved access to laboratories which would give CIA operatives wet dreams. That tape recorder might be the weirdest thing Harry'd learned of since BOB came to town. He'd have been lost if fate handed him such a thing. Audrey cracked all its secrets in two days.

Not to mention that her bosses, whoever they were, must be interested in the Black Lodge. Wherever she worked, they must know about Project Bluebook--he'd called a few libraries and discovered a few books mentioning the Project, no mention of the Lodge--but it wouldn't be impossible to dig deeper.

Plant one spy in the right government agency. Wait.

Cooper lived in the damn Lodge for four years. Audrey engineered, then oversaw Cooper's rescue. And then she left town before Cooper so much as woke up for an interview. Nonsense. Unless something wicked overwhelmed her schedule. Given the near-magical qualities Harry associated with her work, he worried about an impending apocalypse.

Well, then, he ought to make some peace.

He slipped into the shared hospital-room. A man Harry didn't recognize slept in one of the four beds. He was hooked up to an IV and weighed maybe a hundred pounds. Drifter, probably on his way to Seattle. Cooper's bed was caddy-corner to the drifter's. If Cooper looked any better than his roommate, it was only because he'd been in recovery a week longer.

Cooper was awake, as the doctor said. He sat up in his bed, supported by a couple of pillows folded over. A little thinner since the last time Harry saw him. He had a pad of paper on his lap. A felt-tip pen lay on the bed next to his right leg, which now ended an inch and a half below the knee.

Truman didn't know what to say. Four years he'd tried to stop BOB from turning Twin Peaks into his personal fear-farm. Last time he saw Dale was six miles north of One-Eyed Jack's, and Dale was all smiles and promises of torture, and not incidentally, he still had both legs. Now he looked...

"She says it's dysgraphia," Cooper said. He did not look in Harry's direction.

"What's that?"

"I can't write anymore." As he said this, Harry approached Cooper's bedside. He glanced down at the pad of paper. On the top of the page, someone--probably a nurse--had printed _It has never been born,/It has never died;/It has never been freed,/It has never been fooled;/It has never existed,/It has never not existed_. Harry imagined Cooper carefully quoting those lines word for word, the nurse raising an eyebrow.

Underneath was Cooper's attempt at copying those lines. Harry frowned. The letters sprawled, changed size and shape, slanted up then down. He sort of made out a couple of legible lines, but they were still unreadable in the end--every word misspelled, several words in the wrong place, a shaky curve where the semicolon should be jutting up into the previous line.

"Jesus. I'm sorry, Coop."

"Thank you. I thought a little physical therapy, combined with regular visits to a psychiatrist and at least one prescription, and I'd be back at work in a year. That's the last time I ever making the mistake of planning ahead."

"Don't cash in your IRA yet. If the Feds don't want you back, you've got a job waiting for you at the station."

"No."

"Hold on, now, hear me out. You can still use a tape recorder. Just record all your notes. If Lucy doesn't have the time to type 'em up, well. I suppose you might have heard I'm not working at the station anymore." Harry almost smiled. "Lots of time on my hands. Could always improve my typing."

Dale finally looked up. His eyes were bloodshot. "You're very--"

"Insistent, yeah."

"Compassionate. I've been away... a while. And knowing me recently must have been miserable. But here you are. Offering me a job at a place you don't even work for. Because you want to keep a promise you made to a dead man. You don't know who you're talking to, and Hawk doesn't know who he's hiring. You're very kind, Harry, but kindness isn't enough. You have to be smart."

"Not really. It's easier to keep around friends who're smarter than me." Harry heard the thin man shifting around, the bedsheets whispering. Whatever else he had to say to Dale could wait. He wasn't big on performing for an audience. "How about we start small? Can you drink anything yet?"

"Not alcohol."

"I was thinking something more caffeinated. From the Double R."

He did not smile, but a spark caught in Cooper's dark eyes. "Oh. Goodness, yes."

***

Harry tried settling into a new routine. Pretty easy, once he got the ball rolling. He stayed in all day unless he'd run out of food. Read the paper. Worked through a few books. Tapered off the drinking. The most exciting parts of his day were two phone calls.

Audrey checked in every day at twelve-oh-nine. He assumed she wanted somebody outside of her work to notice if she dropped off the face of the planet. She was cagey about her current mission, more focused on how Cooper was getting by. He told her everything he knew.

Then, anywhere from five to eight, Cooper dropped him a line. Awkward at first, a little bizarre, Coop didn't know how to talk to other people anymore than Harry. They got used to it after a few days. Coop still talked in blunt bursts, but a touch of his old style snuck in to his words. On the fifth day, he cheerfully mentioned how much easier it was to do a handstand now, and Harry grinned so hard his face hurt.

In the middle of the second week, Harry invited Cooper to the Double R. Dumbass idea. He should've waited longer. But, hell, Coop had to find out sometime, didn't he?

Norma gave Cooper a quiet welcome punctuated with a hug. She'd put on a few pounds in the interim, and like everything else she put on, it looked great on her. Privately, Harry thought her the most resilient woman in Twin Peaks, next to Audrey. Everything she'd been through, Hank's suicide, a pretty public fight with Nadine, another, less public argument that ended with Norma in the hospital for five days... and still she smiled.

Dale, to his credit, waited until the usual pleasantries passed by, and he and Harry sat down at the bar, before asking about Annie.

"She went back," Norma said, pouring a mug of coffee, "after she got out of the hospital."

Harry watched Cooper pick up the mug, inhale a trail of steam, take a tidy sip. "I'd like to call her. Would that be all right?"

"No. She doesn't want anybody from here calling her. Not even me." Norma turned her head and asked Mirna to get those pies out of the oven.

"I'm sorry," Harry said a beat later, when she'd disappeared into the back room.

"Why? Nobody's to blame," Cooper said. He drank a little more coffee, then set the mug on the counter, near where the handle of his cane rested. "Did Hank really kill himself?"

"How..." Don't ask. "I suppose he must have. I trust Sheriff Hawk's investigative team."

"Harry, you are a gentle soul." Another drink. "My phone's been ringing off the hook."

"They weren't supposed to hand out your number." Audrey was going to fire everybody sitting at the front desk when she got back.

"I told them to. And a good thing I did, or Albert would've burned down half of Twin Peaks on his way to the Northern, out of spite. Other than him, I have the feeling everybody'd rather call than visit. They'd want to ask me too many questions in person. At this point, a couple of questions would be better than staring at the same walls."

Damn, they made good coffee here. "You're welcome. What happened to your leg?"

"Dream logic." Cooper sounded a little light, as though he found this whole subject pretty funny. "A few years in, I found out that the little man--you know, the one who told me about the gum--was what remained of MIKE's arm. MIKE couldn't just leave the Black Lodge. He had to sacrifice. MIKE's not the first creature to escape like that, either. They have a guillotine in the sixty-third manifestation of the sitting-room."

The two truckers sitting a few stools over were staring. Harry meaningfully glanced over Cooper's shoulder, then at Cooper. The pale man kept talking, but his voice lowered, masked by the common diner sounds of conversation and porcelain.

"I tried it. It didn't work. And I _knew_ it wouldn't. I was alive when I went in the Lodge, and that place has rules. Rules for those who were borne out of the Lodge. And other rules for dead people drawn into the Lodge. And other-other rules for living people who enter by choice. I couldn't leave the way MIKE did, anymore than Laura could leave the way I did. In the moment, all I wanted was to get out. And if I didn't try, I'd always wonder. It felt like a very rational decision, but they all feel that way, don't they?"

"Yeah," Harry said, "'specially when you're dreaming."

Cooper almost smiled, snorted back a laugh, finished off his coffee. Harry didn't get the joke and didn't care.

***

"Do you need help with him?" Audrey, no matter where she called from these days, always sounded clear as a bell over the phone. Perfect connection.

"No," Harry said. He stood mostly-dressed (he couldn't find one of his socks) by the kitchen counter, holding the phone in one hand and a rag in the other. He stretched up, getting all the top corners of the cabinets. All this dust was getting to him. "He's not dangerous anymore, Audrey, just... weird. Maybe weirder. He's not convinced he's really awake, is what I think."

"Well, good luck with that. I'm not convinced any of us are awake."

"What the hell are you working on?"

"Don't be stupid, Harry."

"Okay." Lot of dust-bunnies on the windowsill. "All I'm saying is it's hard to relate to him anymore."

"Try harder."

"I am, I am, but it's like talking to a space alien sometimes."

"We ought to thank our lucky stars he's capable of talking at all. I don't know all the details" bullshit, it was all classified, and Harry trusted Audrey enough to only tell him what he had to know "but I had a few hypotheses on the Black Lodge. Finding Agent Cooper just confirmed one of them. Whatever we think of as the rules of the universe _don't exist there_. Anybody who enters the Lodge believing it's a place of laws to be exploited is in for a nasty surprise."

Maybe Cooper did enter with perfect courage, Harry thought. Because he'd broken plenty of rules and laws in his glorious career, and always got away with it, confident that his own rightness vindicated his actions. And maybe, once he learned there were no rules to break except those written by BOB, he lost his way in fear. Later he lost his leg. Slowly Truman climbed up on the kitchen counter, craning up to reach the top of the blinds.

"It's been way too long since Agent Cooper had a conversation with a real person." A pop, not from the connection, from chewing-gum. He wondered why she continued calling their mutual friend an Agent. "And if anything, he's not sleeping. He might be one of the only people on Earth who's really awake. Isolating him won't help him."

"So, uh... you want me to act like everything's what passes for usual 'round here, Coop included."

"Yep."

"That'd be easier if he had a case," Harry pointed out, then grunted as he crawled off the counter with all the delicacy of an aging athlete.

She sighed. "I've got one for him. By the way, how's Margaret?"

"I, uh... haven't talked to her in a while. I don't get out to town like I used to."

"Change that. Soon."

"You said something about a case."

"Okay, Boswell, if you want it that much..."

***

"They can't find BOB," Harry said at four.

He and Coop were in his living room. A big improvement over a few years ago--the curtains were still drawn, but he'd recycled all the newspapers, and a few photographs and pictures made their way onto the cleaned walls. Cooper's cane leaned casually against the sofa's right arm. For now he had an aluminum prosthetic and the cane to help him balance; he could get something more realistic in the future, but, Harry thought, he wouldn't. In Cooper's point of view, he'd lost his leg long enough ago to cope with it, and he was just glad to be able to get around without crawling.

Cooper held a mug of coffee near his lips, didn't drink. He looked over at Harry, a nervous, sick glint in his eyes. "Why didn't you tell me sooner?"

"I didn't know 'til this afternoon. I'm supposed to ask you some questions about him."

"Why?"

"You're officially the only living person who's spent enough time with BOB to offer some insights."

"Who told you?"

"Audrey." Harry shifted, scooched back into the depths of the sofa. "I'm not gonna bullshit you, Coop. We're not the heroes anymore. Audrey was there for you in the Lodge 'cause it's her case. If this was a movie, she'd get top billing. And, you know, I'm more of a sidekick than a hero anyway, so I wound up taking orders from Audrey while you were out, and it's worked out great for everybody. She thinks you know something about BOB she doesn't know yet. She thinks BOB's got a new face, and you're going to help her guess whose. That's about all she'll tell me. It was good enough for me. Maybe you'd have done different--"

"Oh, no," Dale said. "Audrey's smarter than I am. When I was that young, I was embarrassing. And she's got a badge. Other than Hawk, you couldn't have picked a better boss."

"He's my boss, too," Harry said. "They run the Bookhouse. I'm just along for the ride. So does this mean you'll consent to an interview?"

"Certainly, Sheriff." Cooper very nearly smiled, killed it at the last second by drinking the last of his coffee. "Are you going to record it?"

"It'd be better than me taking notes. I can't do shorthand."

Cooper set down his coffee, slipped a hand into his pocket, pulled out his tape recorder. Harry grinned. He had assumed the micro-cassette recorder was lost to or warped by the Lodge, but here it was, all in one piece. Coop punched two buttons, spoke the date and time into the recording, and then said: "Diane, I'll get right to the point--BOB likes junkie's bodies. Doesn't matter what the addiction is, so long as they're addicted."

"What was yours?" Harry asked. Couldn't stop himself.

"Cigarettes. The doctor gave me a patch when she realized I was nic-fitting in recovery."

"Lucky for you it wasn't something illegal."

"I guess, but I'll tell you, it's no walk in the park, patch or no."

"D'you think it'd be cigarettes again, if he possessed somebody else?"

"Well, that's by far the easiest addiction to give somebody--cheap, no need to find a dealer... but I'd be surprised if that was the only addiction..."

***

They recorded until ten o'clock, when Harry asked if his friend needed a ride back to the hotel.

"If you don't mind, Harry, I'd like to stay here."

"Oh." He turned off the sink, put the rinsed-out mug into the dishwasher's top rack. "I don't mind. What's wrong with the Great Northern?"

"It's haunted," Cooper said, and nothing Truman said after that convinced Cooper to explain any more.

***

One night became three, then a week. Harry told an incredibly pissed-off Audrey to cancel the hotel reservation, and reassured her, much as he could, that Cooper was better off. He acted more like a human being when he shared space.

Harry slept on the sofa--it wasn't too terrible on his back--and let Coop have the bedroom. Lucky he'd cleared the place out before he offered it to Cooper. Other than all the tiny holes in the walls, and the plywood still covering the windows, there weren't any overt signs of how bad Harry fell when he was alone. 'Course he was kidding himself if he thought Cooper would stay blissfully ignorant, but he didn't care if his friend figured out all his secrets. That was a typical side effect of Cooper's friendship.

They burned through two eight-packs of micro-cassettes. Most of it had to do with BOB at first, but after a while, the tapes started segueing into the Lodge in general, or what befell Twin Peaks in Cooper's absence. Harry had no idea how much of this would be useful for Audrey, but he securely shipped each tape to the PO box she named, anyhow.

All but one. The first tape from the third pack.

At the one-hour-forty-five-minute-two-second mark, Cooper said: "If he feeds on fear, he doesn't like leaving anything on his plate. I haven't been afraid since Audrey freed me."

"That good or bad?" Normally Harry had to ask a few leading questions, but this time, Coop led himself.

"The only good thing BOB ever did. Do you realize how much we're all afraid of, Harry? How much life passes us by while we shiver in dread? How much have you missed out on, just because you were afraid of it?"

"Huh. I guess... a lot." Places he didn't visit because of his phobia of airplanes. Car races he bowed out of as a teen because he feared the hospital or the sheriff's station. People he never kissed because he feared rejection. "After you first left, I boarded up my whole damn house. Looked like I was expectin' the Ruskies. And I knew being scared of BOB just made him stronger, and happier, but I couldn't help it. I hated leaving home."

"Think of all the swell coffee you didn't drink while you were stuck at home."

He snorted, watched as Coop drank a little tea (too late in the day for coffee).

"But this is my point, Harry. He lives on fear, and he needs _extraordinary_ fear, because our mundane terrors are his hors d'oeuvres. He doesn't just eat them, he destroys them. I can't write anymore, and the closest I've come to fear since my rescue was when you told me they can't find BOB. The Lodge did a lot to me, but those are the most permanent affects, so far. Honestly, it's liberating."

"All right, Coop. I'm glad you can see a bright side in all this."

"It may not be a bright side. I am... peculiar. And a very healthy fear of hiding how peculiar I am from other people changed me from a friendless creep to somebody people like. That fear is gone."

"C'mon, everybody knows you're weird. Nobody cares."

"You might." Harry had the feeling he was standing at the end of a long trail through the dark woods, peering into the thicket Cooper spent almost two hours guiding him towards. Harry looked over at his old friend, watched as Cooper tucked his hands into a doubled fist under his weak chin. "I didn't come to Twin Peaks for an illicit romance. I came here to work, and I was working twenty-four hours a day--"

"Including in your dreams," Harry said, grinning at the memory.

Cooper did not return the smile. "Yes. If there were an exhibition on Why Cooper Should Not Love Anybody, my work would be the centerpiece. Some people can handle both. I can't. I always tangle my work with my love life. You know, after I joined the agency--before Caroline--I only dated other recruits, other agents. We talked shop. Windom Earle taught me how incredibly foolhardy that was. So I went all in on my work. Told myself I was happy and not deluded."

"Deluded's a strong word."

"It's the _right_ word. If anything ever happened between Audrey and me, which it did not, but if it did, it would always raise some eyebrows. But the idea that I could wait 'til the case ended and avoid anybody asking pointed questions was... a delusion. A lie, if you like that better. I lied to myself because I was afraid of the truth--Audrey's a stunning woman who deserves a lot better than I can give, and I was going to put her off until she gave up on me. Which is what happened."

Harry crossed, uncrossed, recrossed his legs. Earlier he'd eaten half an apple; he picked up the remaining browning half from the table, shrugged. "Don't count yourself out yet. Miss Horne hasn't exactly waited around pining, but so far as I know, she's single and fond of you."

"Really?" He never smiled anymore. He'd nearly get there, then find some way of hiding it or driving it back. "Thanks, but that doesn't solve all my problems. Audrey Horne isn't the only person I'm attracted to--there's you. And I probably should be afraid of the consequences of that, wanting so much when I should be happy on my own, but I don't. That's a little strange, isn't it?"

"Wait. Wait, wait, wait." Harry didn't miss the lede, much as Coop buried it in a pile of words. He took a bite out of the apple. Chewed it over. He thought about an article in the town crier after the incident in the farm. Damned intern spent four paragraphs on Andy throwing up in front of the news crew. Waited 'til the ninth, which was on page 13A, to describe the scene Andy reacted to. So somebody in the world was worse at this than Cooper. Good thing to remember at the moment. "You're--to--since when?"

"Since I took up whittling."

"That's a long time."

"I've been busy."

"Yeah." He watched as Cooper finished his tea. Plunked the mug on the coffee-table. Reached over to Harry's side of the table, and punched the STOP button on the tape recorder. "So, you're saying you'd want me and Audrey--"

"Not at the same time." Cooper almost smiled again.

"Oh, Jesus, don't even say that. So, uh, that's, you'll have a hell of a time with Audrey. She's not real big on sharing." Harry dropped the apple back on the table, watched it bounce twice, then picked up the recorder. He plucked the micro-cassette out of its cradle. Unconsciously he peered at the nearly-invisible thread of film within the cassette case, checking for signs of splitting or double-helixing.

"What about you?"

"I'm." He flicked the tape back and forth like a fan, tapping it against his left knee. "You were right about a few things, about Josie. But... see... I didn't care about anything but the lying. And I know why she had to lie, and now I'm just sad. She couldn't trust me. That's not all on her, it's mostly on me. And I was... well, I knew when Josie and me were on the outs, and I had... space... to think about other people. But I wanted Josie back, and anything other than thinkin' about somebody else would ruin my shot at winning her over again. Then I figured I was bad luck."

"Not you, Harry." The words were plain. Cooper's tone, all whispered warmth, was not.

"Maybe not, but you can see where I'd think different. I just don't know. Sure, I like you, but I'm not up for much else."

"Okay." No disappointment. No hurt. Harry envied Cooper's peacefulness. "What're you doing with the tape?"

"Startin' over," Harry said. He tossed the old one onto the coffee-table by the apple, reached for a fresh tape out of the pack.

***

Four days and three hours later, Dale said: "In Tibetan Buddhism, you go to three bardos after you die."

"Uh-huh," Harry said.

"A bardo's not a place, it's a type of time. It's like, uh, a holding-pattern. All you do in a bardo is wait for it to end, one way or another. You follow?"

"Yeah."

"They trick you into forgetting Nirvana. The first bardo looks like Heaven, draws you in by showing you all your gods. The second, uh, looks like Hell, and it draws you in by convincing you of your guilt."

"Mm, right," Harry said, blinking slowly. Cooper could talk the patience out of a saint.

"The third... gives you visions of people... people making love. Lots of people don't want the responsibility of being a god. And lots of people can let go of their guilt. But very few people resist the promise of an orgasm."

"Uh-huh."

Cooper's eyebrows crinkled his forehead. "I'm boring. Sorry. I used to be better at this."

"You're outta practice," Harry breathed. "Move with me, you'll remember."

"Maybe. Harry..."

"Yeah?"

"Harry..." Cold fingers stroked up the back of Harry's neck, tugged at his shirt collar. Neither of them had taken off a stitch, he wasn't ready for counting all of Cooper's new scars, and he knew how to please somebody who was fully dressed.

"You were about to say something," he said.

A strong, thin hand squeezed round the back of Harry's neck, and Cooper leaned up like he wanted a kiss; instead his lips settled on the edge of his ear, treated him to the sound of Dale half-moaning his name.

"Oh, good," Harry muttered. His hands toyed along the inside seam of his partner's jeans, then the waistline. Flannel shirt was still tucked in. He fixed that with a sharp yank, found out the gentle warmth Cooper carried near his core. Felt like he blushed wherever Harry touched him, his stomach, his hips, the small of his back.

He relaxed, half-sprawling onto Cooper, hips refusing to let up their ponderous grind, and finally something moved his partner, changed him from yielding to throbbing. He rocked. Dale made a sound that wasn't exactly a moan, thrusted up, and the bed shivered as though it understood.

***

Harry, on the phone the next day, at twelve-sixteen p.m.:

"Great... We're doing great... Probably not. He wants to talk to you."


End file.
